Friday, July 31, 2015

"[V]ery little of the $753,000 it spent from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2015, went directly to political candidates and committees. Instead, SarahPAC’s top expenditures largely helped fortify its own existence—or helped Palin personally. . .

Yet, during the first half of 2015, SarahPAC only spent $25,000 on candidate contributions—less than 4 percent of its overall expenditures.

Conservative Republican Reps. Louie Gohmert, Trey Gowdy, Raúl Labrador, and Ted Yoho are among the 43 candidates to receive SarahPAC cash so far this year, with most getting $500. The per-election federal limit is $2,700.

Palin’s PAC has never given more than a small fraction of its income away to the Republicans it supports."

Thursday, July 30, 2015

The man who opened fire in a Lafayette, La., movie theater [John Russell House] . . . was, by all accounts, a far-right ideologue. . .

Houser was steeped and stewing in right-wing xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist and racist hate. He was obviously crazy. It’s generally safe to assume everyone who commits mass murder is. But Houser was crazy and held some beliefs that were variations of more mainstream conservative beliefs. The roots of some of Houser’s political views are hard to distinguish from ideas espoused by many, if not most, of the candidates running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. . .

And yet when white men shoot up movie theaters or black churches,
they’re given the benefit of individuality. We don’t automatically
assume that they represent some disease within all, or even a subset of,
other white men. Even in the face of evidence such as espoused racist,
misogynistic views and participation in organized hate groups, we still
resist drawing any broader conclusions about any white men other than
the shooter. Meanwhile, most mass shooters are white men. Communities
of color or of minority religions, as a whole, are rarely given the
benefit of the doubt of collective innocence. White men, and white
people in general, always are. That white privilege extends even to
white mass murderers shows just how insidious it is. . .

We habitually scrutinize the ideology behind black and Muslim violence while letting white men off the hook. . .

Sure, there’s more to discover about Houser’s particular motives and state of mind that night. But we know what prompted Houser. We know he is not an accident of a hateful, us-versus-them ideology, but an automatic, albeit unfortunate, consequence. You cannot plant the seeds of hatred and antipathy and then curse them when they grow beyond your control.

Spread misogyny and anti-immigrant nationalism and homophobia and anti-black racial bias, and they will take root. As a seed, Houser was downright rotten. But he clearly fell from a very dangerous and rotting tree."

UPDATE: "Tucked into a dusty corner of the Senate’s Highway Trust Fund bill — legislation that must pass before the fund runs dry on July 31 — is a zombie proposal to hire private debt-collection agencies to hound delinquent taxpayers on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS has actually tried outsourcing tax collection activities to private debt collectors before, at Congress’s behest. Twice, in fact, over the last two decades.

Both times, the experiment was a disaster.

Privatizing delinquent tax collections led to complaints from taxpayers who got harassed and bullied by an industry known for rampant harassment and bullying, articularly of low-income people who don’t know their rights. In one oft-cited case, a private debt collector made 150 calls to the elderly parents of a taxpayer even after the collection agency learned that the taxpayer was no longer living at that address.

Perhaps more important, at least from a fiscal responsibility perspective, both times the program was scrapped because it actually cost taxpayers money on net, despite assurances ahead of time of the huge bounty it would lasso in."

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

UPDATE: "There is nothing secret about the nativist views of Donald Trump, a dyspeptic business tycoon running for the Republican presidential nomination. His finger-jabbing speeches about Mexican rapists and murderers, flowing across the border “like water”, and American jobs being shipped to China have taken him to the top of most polls. More dismaying, his apparent popularity has unmanned more conventional presidential rivals, only some of whom have chided him for his bigotry. . .

The Trump surge has been startling. After all, lots of conservatives growl about immigrants changing America, and shops full of cheap Chinese goods, without enjoying such success. Mr Trump is funding his campaign himself, which means he has no need to flatter donors. Is it this outsider status as a non-politician that marks him out? Or perhaps the unfiltered quality of his rage?

The Trump technique involves confiding in unhappy Americans that they are victims of a plot—and a plot, what is more, that could be easily thwarted. In his telling, scheming foreign governments have outwitted a soft political elite in Washington and preyed on America’s openness and generosity. He is tapping into a political tradition with deep roots. The Know-Nothings are only one example. The “America First” movement of the early 1940s accused decadent Europeans and well-connected Jews of conspiring to drag America into a new world war. In the 1960s the John Birch Society saw communist cunning at every turn."

The article includes an interesting historical reminder, which I forgot if I ever heard:

"IT WAS a winter night in 1854 when nine men broke into the building site of the Washington Monument, stole a slab of marble and—according to a later confession—heaved it into the Potomac river. The stone, which once belonged to the Temple of Concord in Rome, was a gift from Pope Pius IX. The attackers belonged to an anti-Catholic political movement, nicknamed “Know-Nothings” on account of their strict code of secrecy. Their movement considered Catholic immigrants a menace to the republic. At its peak, followers included dozens of congressmen, some governors and an ex-president. The Know-Nothings feared that the papal stone was a coded call to arms, sent to spark an immigrant uprising. Their vandalism helped to halt the monument’s construction for years. To this day a change in stone colour, part-way up the obelisk, betrays that nativist moment."

"Mr Trump is in the real-estate business, an industry rife with red tape, in which a little political leverage can be worth a fortune. . .

You'd have to be astoundingly brazen to run for president, churning up toxic xenophobic sentiments, just to get the political leverage to win a huge tax break, or to build a casino or to stop somebody else's casino. But Mr Trump is neither a meek nor public-spirited man. And, astonishingly enough, he may have actually succeeded in putting the Republican Party in a corner.

If cutting a sweet deal is what Mr Trump was aiming to do all along, we might have to admit that he is more than the attention-seeking buffoon he appears to be. It may be that he is a attention-seeking, buffoonish genius. In any case, Mr Trump has floated the possibility that he may try to wreck the Republican Party's presidential chances unless it coughs up a little 'fair' treatment, whatever that means. If the GOP doesn't think it can neutralise Mr Trump's threat of a third-party run by utterly demolishing his reputation, then they're going to have to consider a little fairness. Not a bad month's work for Mr Trump."

Monday, July 27, 2015

UPDATE XII: "Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he’s now the hub around which the
race revolves, and that only makes the rest of the candidates’ problem
more acute. It’s hard enough to get noticed when you have 15
competitors, but when one of them soaks up so media attention, it
becomes even harder. All that pushes candidates — at the debates, and
elsewhere — to do something, anything, to get some notice. . .

The [upcoming GOP] debate could play out in a number of ways: candidates could attack
Trump, or a few might go after Jeb Bush, hoping to become the
alternative to the closest thing the race has to a non-Trump
frontrunner, or something else entirely might occur. But if all of them
are looking for someone to strike at, it could end up being a demolition
derby — fun to watch, but not exactly the thing to inspire faith in the
participants."

'Yes,' he says, 'Yes it is I made the rule that I’m fire and if I touch you you burn up and nothing you can do can undo it ’cause fire beats everything.'

'That’s not fair,' you say.

'And I touched you and now you’re out,' he says, and shortly afterwards the game ends in him winning, because that is the only way he will allow it to end.

Certain five-year-olds are impervious to rules. They won’t play nicely. They trample through your sandcastles. They arrogate sudden inexplicable powers to themselves which render them invincible and can therefore defeat you at a touch, or they announce that they can cross into your territory by special dispensation, or they simply refuse to stay tagged when you tag them.

'This won’t work if he doesn’t freeze when he’s tagged!' you complain, but — what authority do you have? The rules of games possess only as much authority as you allow them. There are no referees handing out red cards for Red Rover. You are in a state of nature unless the other kindergartners agree otherwise.

And this can be extremely frustrating when you are accustomed to playing by the rules. There you are, with Ted and Bobby and Carly, playing nicely, and then along comes Donald and announces that you aren’t playing Traditional GOP Primary Where Everyone Can Be Handicapped By Gaffes but instead King Donald’s Primary where everything everyone says has consequences except for what Donald says because Donald is made of fire.

He is the terror of the schoolyard for a reason. 'Can we play it my way?' you ask. No. You can’t. His way or no way at all. And now he’s got your favorite truck.

You can’t win against someone who refuses to admit that there are rules. Not only that, but you can’t declare him 'out.' If he wants to play with you, you’re stuck.

And this is the problem we’re running into now with Donald Trump. . .

We, as a public and as a media, are used to an election game that has, if not certain rules, certain — accepted formulas and traditions. It is supposed to be a kind of low-rent reality TV for people who couldn’t make it on real reality TV — proportionally more serious and less entertaining. If it is the GOP primary, the more it looks like Twelve Angry Men, the better. But the rules only exist by our mutual and silent agreement. So does the game itself, for that matter."

UPDATE IX: "How did America get to such a place that someone like Donald Trump can command a lead in the Republican primaries? Trump is the product of a deliberate Republican strategy, adopted by Richard Nixon’s people in 1968, to attract voters with an apocalyptic redemption story rather than reasoned argument. It has taken almost 50 years, but we have finally arrived at the culmination of postmodern politics in which Republican leaders use words to create their own reality."

UPDATE VII: "Trump has merely held up a mirror to the GOP. The man, long experience has shown, believes in nothing other than himself. He has, conveniently, selected the precise basket of issues that Republicans want to hear about — or at least a significant proportion of Republican primary voters. He may be saying things more colorfully than others when he talks about Mexico sending rapists across the border, but his views show that, far from being an outlier, he is hitting all the erogenous zones of the GOP electorate."

UPDATE VI: "There’s no world in which Donald Trump is a serious candidate for president. Republican elites don’t want him, Republican donors don’t want him, and if—through some cosmic fluke—he managed to win a major primary, every strategist and activist in the Republican Party would turn their aim toward him and his candidacy.

But just because Trump is an unqualified vanity candidate doesn’t mean he’s unimportant in the story of the 2016 GOP presidential primary. Unlike Chris Christie or Mike Huckabee—two vastly more legitimate candidates—Trump is popular with Republican voters. A new CNN national poll puts him in second place in the GOP field at 12 percent support—seven points behind the leader, Jeb Bush—while recent polls from Iowa and New Hampshire also show him with a second place spot in those crucial early contests. If Trump holds his position, he’ll be on stage with Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio when official debates start in August (he could even lose some support and still make the cut).

The obvious question is “Why?”—why does Trump have a hold on this thick slice of the members of the Republican base? The answer is, unlike the professional politicians in the race, Trump is—from his views on immigration to the “issue” of Obama's citizenship—one of them."

UPDATE V: "He has virtually zero chance of winning the presidential nomination. But insiders worry that the loud-mouthed mogul is more than just a minor comedic nuisance on cable news; they fret that he’s a loose cannon whose rants about Mexicans and scorched-earth attacks on his rivals will damage the eventual nominee and hurt a party struggling to connect with women and minorities and desperate to win."

UPDATE II: The Donald "can’t seem to stop himself. Trump’s announcement (from Trump Tower,
’natch) that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination was a
veritable festival of the first person. A search of the transcript finds
that he uttered “I” 195 times, “my” or “mine” 28 times, “me” 22 times
and “I’ve or “I’d” 12 times — for a grand total of 257 self-references."

Read also the Washington Post, The Trump clown show, which notes that "America has its share (maybe a larger share) of hucksters, con men,
pranksters and the like who seek to grab their 15 minutes of fame. We
should not be surprised when they show up in presidential races. And
while Trump is a ludicrous figure with no chance to win, there are lots
of other candidates who have an equally low chance (zero) to make it to
the nomination. Still, it is worse having Trump there, since he
obviously is using this opportunity purely as self-promotion and to air
his obnoxious attitudes."

UPDATE: "The world's most big-headed businessman is about to enter the 2016 election, and the GOP is in trouble".

"[I]f I were a Republican presidential candidate, I would do everything in my power to get Trump taken seriously. Oh, I know in previous years he has hinted at a presidential run and then done nothing. But the man provides a utility that the party dearly needs: He makes the other candidates seem reasonable. . .

Trump’s most interesting quirk is his touching conviction that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. You may wonder about the religious fervor of some of the candidates — the ever-running Rick Santorum, for instance — or the suppressed isolationism of Rand Paul. But nothing approaches Trump’s birther belief.

It remains remotely possible that Trump fastened on the birther stuff just to get some attention. After all, he is in other respects both smart and canny. He has built an impressive real estate empire and presided over a long-lasting and evidently successful TV show. He is a billionaire, and his brand is either an icon or a narcotic: People flock to his buildings, positioning themselves so the name Trump can be seen in their selfies.

It’s possible that even in American politics one can go too far. Maybe Trump has soiled himself. Now, it is true that Obama’s birth certificate was a bit late in showing up, but why demand it and not, at the same time, John McCain’s? Could it have been Obama’s race? Or that his father was born in Kenya? Or that his middle name is Hussein? Could it, in short, be a reflection of prejudice? I mean, black man, white mother, Kenyan father, strange middle name .?.?. can’t you connect the dots? Trump can. Follow them long enough and you’re in the loony bin.

Trump’s birther obsession is both distasteful and more than a minor tic, like his flamboyant hairdo. When, for instance, Hawaii’s health director, Loretta Fuddy, died in the crash of a small plane, Trump tweeted: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.” Was he implying that Obama somehow killed her — maybe by drone? Who knows? Kenyans are capable of anything.

American politics sometimes seems to me to be a version of the movie “Animal House.” Every four years, some wholly unqualified person surfaces — usually in the Republican Party — and is swiftly declared some sort of political messiah. Last time around it was the ridiculous Herman Cain, pedigreed by right-wing pundits as the man we’ve all been waiting for, and before that the comedic Sarah Palin, a woman for whom the word unqualified is itself unqualified. This year, it could be almost anyone, but whoever it is, he or she (Carly Fiorina?) better pray that Donald Trump gets fully into the race. He’ll make everyone else look better."

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Have you ever observed that time seems to be going by faster as you get older? . .

[Some theorize that] we perceive time by comparing it with our life span: The apparent length of a period of time is proportional to our life span itself.

We perceive our first few years to be much longer in duration than the years that come later -- as the graphic above this shows. If you measure your life this way, in "perceived" time rather than actual time, half of your "perceived life" is over by age 7. If you factor in the fact that you don't remember much of your first three years, then half of your perceived life is over by the time you turn 18, Kiener writes.

In mathematical terms, our time perception is logarithmic -- stretched out at the beginning and compressed at the end -- rather than linear, in which each year has the same length. If you don't know, or don't want to think about math, it's basically the difference between the graph on the left, which is how time proceeds according to calendars, and the graph on the right, which starts slow and then ramps up:

In mathematical terms, our time perception is logarithmic -- stretched
out at the beginning and compressed at the end -- rather than linear, in
which each year has the same length. If you don't know, or don't want
to think about math, it's basically the difference between the graph on
the left, which is how time proceeds according to calendars, and the
graph on the right, which starts slow and then ramps up:

More recent theories about how we experience time draw on psychology and science. . .

One idea is that the passage of time speeds up with familiarity. As we
get older, things become more familiar to us, and time slips by as a
result. There is some evidence that we tend to remember events between
the ages of 15 and 25 most vividly because
we experience so many new things in that time. A related idea is that
we can actually slow down our experience of time through paying
attention to the present moment, what people call mindfulness.

This might seem depressing -- it kind of is. But it's also a reminder to savor our time and remember that it is precious."

Read the Washington Post, Why time really does seem to go faster as you get older.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

UPDATE: "It’s astonishing even now how blithely top European officials dismissed warnings that slashing government spending and raising taxes would cause deep recessions, how they insisted that all would be well because fiscal discipline would inspire confidence. (It didn’t.) The truth is that trying to deal with large debts through austerity alone — in particular, while simultaneously pursuing a hard-money policy — has never worked. It didn’t work for Britain after World War I, despite immense sacrifices; why would anyone expect it to work for Greece?"

Read also, the Washington Post, Europe’s dirty little secret is Greece will never pay back its debt, which notes that "if Greece can't cut its way out of debt and it can't grow its way out of debt, its only option is to default its way out of debt. There are more and less painful ways of doing this. Least among them is for the two sides to work together, so both can keep getting at least some money from the other. That's a polite default, or a restructuring. And the IMF has suggested three ways that might work. Europe can either give Greece money every year; give Greece a pass on some of what it owes; or give Greece far more time to pay what it owes, with a 30-year grace period at the start. But in any case, Europe is effectively going to have to give—notice how that word keeps popping up—Greece money. It just depends on how they want to do it."

And here's a dirty little secret for you -- well not really a secret, just something Republi-cons would never admit -- the United States of America only works because of money subsidies/transfers from rich, prosperous states to poor, needy states and labor mobility from poor, needy regions to wealthy, prosperous regions.

"Conservative opposition to Obama’s expected deal with Iran is based
on a critique of Obama’s peculiar failings. He is naive in the face of
evil, desperate for agreement, more willing to help his enemies than his
friends. The problem is that conservatives have made this same
diagnosis of every American president for 70 years. They do not merely
oppose this deal, they oppose all of them, because they believe evil
regimes cannot be negotiated with. Their analysis of the Iran
negotiations is not an analysis at all, but an impulse.

None
of this is to say that the Obama administration has handled Iran the
correct way. Even if it has, the agreement is unsatisfactory for the
same basic reasons that every treaty with a brutal regime is
unsatisfactory. The truth neither Obama nor his critics will acknowledge
is that there probably isn’t any potential deal that can prevent Iran
from obtaining nuclear weapons. On the other hand, bombing Iran is also
unlikely to work, as is maintaining effective international sanctions
for years on end. The least bad option will probably be, in the end,
having to rely on deterrence to stop Iran. . .

But the
conservative response to Obama’s negotiations is the expression of a
pathological inability to grapple with the limits of military power at
all."

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Sunspot activity have been observed and recorded for at least 400 year.

"Yes, numbers of sunspots
can vary by that much [60%] or even more on an 11-year cycle, but the sun’s
output—the total amount of energy we get—is extremely stable and only
changes by about 0.1 percent, even in extreme sunspot cycles like the
one [recently predicted in 2030] . . .

Past research
suggests that an extreme decline in solar activity would lead to a
shift of just 0.16 degrees Celsius globally—and even that is erased once
a more typical solar cycle resumes in a few decades. . .

No matter what the sun does over the next century, we are not heading in to a new ice age. Why am I so sure about that? It may have something to do with the 110 million tons of carbon dioxide humanity is pumping into the atmosphere every single day. The resulting change to our global climate system is so huge, it overwhelms all natural atmospheric forces, including the sun. There is no other plausible explanation for global warming except us."

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

UPDATE III: "Obama has governed as a moderate conservative—essentially as what used to be called a liberal Republican before all such people disappeared from the GOP. He has been conservative to exactly the same degree that Richard Nixon basically governed as a moderate liberal, something no conservative would deny today. (Ultra-leftist Noam Chomsky recently called Nixon 'the last liberal president.')

Here’s the proof: . .

Cornell West nailed it when he recently charged that Obama has never been a real progressive in the first place. 'He posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit,' West said. 'We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency.'

I don’t expect any conservatives to recognize the truth of Obama’s fundamental conservatism for at least a couple of decades—perhaps only after a real progressive presidency. In any case, today they are too invested in painting him as the devil incarnate in order to frighten grassroots Republicans into voting to keep Obama from confiscating all their guns, throwing them into FEMA re-education camps, and other nonsense that is believed by many Republicans. But just as they eventually came to appreciate Bill Clinton’s core conservatism, Republicans will someday see that Obama was no less conservative."

UPDATE: "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. . .

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations. . .

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking. . .

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site."

"Placing blame equally on Democrats and Republicans for the stalemate over the debt crisis only encourages more bad behavior." Read The New York Times, The Centrist Cop-Out, which notes:

"Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities. His health reform was very similar to the reform Mitt Romney installed in Massachusetts. Romneycare, in turn, closely followed the outlines of a plan originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. And returning tax rates on high-income Americans to their level during the Roaring Nineties is hardly a socialist proposal.

True, Republicans insist that Mr. Obama is a leftist seeking a government takeover of the economy, but they would, wouldn’t they? The facts, should anyone choose to report them, say otherwise."

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